BSE fiasco

Government failures may have exacerbated the British mad cow disease epidemic but it could not have been avoided, believes the chairman of the BSE inquiry, whose report was published on Thursday.

The human form of the disease has killed 80 people. In addition, millions of cattle have been slaughtered, costing the UK billions of pounds.

The £27 million report says government departments failed badly on two counts. Firstly, for many years they did not make public fears about the potential danger BSE posed to human health - concerns of an economically damaging public over-reaction took precedence. The report says "this campaign of reassurance was a mistake". When the government did announce a likely link between illness in cattle and human in 1996, "the public felt they had been betrayed".

Secondly, they failed to coordinate and direct scientific research into the emergence and spread of the disease. But "the government did not lie to the public," the report concludes. Individual politicians, civil servants and scientists largely escaped scathing criticism.

But avoiding the epidemic at all would not have been possible, according to Lord Phillips. He told a press conference that the long incubation period of BSE meant that thousands of cattle were already infected and being used for food by the time the first case was identified in 1985. "Other countries should ponder on our experience," he said.

New Scientist magazine reported on the first journal paper about BSE in 1987. Read that story here.

The report identifies two key breakdowns in the co-ordination of scientific research and the communication between government departments which meant BSE was not contained as quickly as it should have been.

First was the failure to realise that only a "peppercorn-sized" piece of infectious material might transmit the disease from cow to cow. As a result, measures to prevent the spread were not enforced rigorously enough.

The second, related breakdown was the failure to fully implement the ban on particular infectious cattle parts being used in human food. Lord Philips said the specified bovine offal ban had been "fairly widely disregarded".

The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which at the time had a dual role in protecting food safety and regulating farming, did not receive the severe criticism which many commentators had expected. The report says: "It was not MAFF's policy to lean in favour of agricultural producers to the detriment of the consumer."

MAFF was criticised for a six month delay in releasing scientific information that considered a link between BSE and the similar sheep disease scrapie. This probably delayed research that could have limited the extent of the epidemic.

Compensation for victims

The report, which runs to 4000 pages, was welcomed by all parties in Parliament, in particular by the former Prime Minister John Major, who described it as balanced. Lord Philips rejected suggestions that the report was a "whitewash" or had "pulled its punches".

Presenting the report, the Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, said that the government would put in place measures to ensure that the proper care of the victims of vCJD and compensation for their families would be implemented quickly. He also said an independent person would review whether disciplinary action is needed against any public servants still in office.

The report said there was no certainty about how the disease entered the cattle herd, nor why it predominantly affected only Britain. The minister said that in light of this he would commission "an independent assessment of current scientific understanding on the origins of the BSE epidemic".

Mutated protein

The report does confirm, however, that the BSE epidemic was caused by the feeding of animal protein to cattle. It says BSE is probably a new prion disease which originated in the 1970s as a consequence of a gene mutation in a cow or other animal. It says changes in the way carcasses are rendered had no effect, as rendering can never completely deactivate the infectious BSE agent.

The organisation of scientific research into BSE has been criticised in the past for not allocating the work to the labs best qualified to do it, and for not making clinical samples available to all researchers. The report suggests a research "supremo", overseeing all the work could have avoided these problems.

John Krebs, chairman of the new Food Standards Agency, has advised the government that no new food safety measures are immediately needed in the light of the report. Krebs added: "The inquiry has highlighted how secrecy, and the reluctance to trust the public, dogged efforts to tackle BSE. The Agency pledges that never again will vital information on food safety risks be withheld from the public."

For full expert analysis of the BSE inquiry report, read the next issue of New Scientist magazine, available from 2 November. Subscribe here: www.newscientist.com/subscribe.

The BSE Inquiry Report is on the web at www.bseinquiry.gov.uk

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